Spotify

Following in the footsteps of the AT&T and Beats Music partnership, Spotify is reportedly planning to partner with Sprint to offer its customers an easier way to pay for the service, as well as a free subscription trial, expanding its presence in an increasingly competitive market.

Spotify is one of the more popular streaming services out there for music fans. It has changed the colors of its user interface in an effort to be more uniform across all the platforms where it is available. New colors are a departure for the service since it has used the same basic color scheme since it launched. The new colors are much darker with liberal use of black and high contrast white.

In their decade long run, Last.fm has seen many ups and downs. In late 2012 the popular Internet radio service was cutting back its scale and turned to paid-only subscriptions. They next warmed up to Spotify and teamed up to include their app in Spotify's portfolio. The latest news is that their radio streaming service will no longer be available as of 28th of April 2014. Instead, scrobbling, music discovery, and recommendations are their new direction.

As the on-demand music streaming industry grows and competition with it (rumors that Apple may be among that competition surfaced last week), Spotify is looking to draw in a larger number of listeners to its Premium subscription service, doing so with a big perk: slashed rates for students.

Last week, Spotify revealed that it will be acquiring The Echo Nest, a music-centric service that offers content curation and more. While Spotify has big plans for the new purchase, it spelled bad news for Rdio, which has revealed it will be dropping the company, doing so out of a desire not to share data with its competitor.

Spotify has announced plans to buy The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company which specializes in content curation for services like Nokia Music, as well as more unusual apps built on its deep data feed. The streaming music company will use The Echo Nest's tech to power its updated "Discover" section, which tries to predict and suggest new music the listener might like based on their previous playlists and social networks.

Spotify will add personalized Radio support, along with its Browse and Discover features, to its Windows Phone 8 app this Spring, the streaming music company has confirmed. The new app - which will take on not only Pandora but Nokia Radio as bundled on Lumia handsets - will allow listeners to generate a custom music station based on a seed track or artist, as their counterparts on Android and iOS have been able to do for some time.

In December, Spotify launched an #undiscovered hashtag campaign to draw attention to the songs in its library that have never been played. With it came a massive discombobulated playlist with lonely audio bits ranging from book readings to comedy snippets, making it a bit overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. Forgotify aims to improve that, making it easy to give these undiscovered songs some love.

In a match that seems made in heaven, Internet radio and recommendation service Last.fm has gone into a partnership with music streaming service Spotify. Together the two companies aim to give listeners the music they want and like, even before they know that they do.

Personalization and recommendations are a staple of many services, particularly music services that aim to provide their users with music they want before they know they want it. Spotify could be boosting that idea in the future with a recommendation system that dishes up music based on the user's current heart rate, ensuring there are some tracks at hand for every occasion.

Spotify has more good news this month, this time for both artists and subscribers. Starting today, all artists will be able to sell directly to fans some items such as shirts, vinyls, posters, deluxe editions and others. Best of all, there are no strings attached and no revenue cuts.

Spotify has just opened the flood gates of music bliss to all free users of its service, at least if you're using it on your desktop computer. Free users of its web player will now be able to enjoy streaming their favorite artists and songs with no more time or monthly caps.